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This is going to be very random. Sorry in advance. We’ve had a busy week, and my brain is just quite fractured. Piano Season is gearing up, braces were taken off, people are coming home with news about trips they are planning and the fact that yes, they are going to prom after all, it’s Lent, friends are coming into town….

Links from all over, a clear indication of the cacophony that defines “My Brain.”

Given longstanding Christian opposition to universalism, how has it gained so many adherents in recent times?

The change was a long time coming. As I show in my book, from the time of Origen onward there were individual Christian thinkers who held to some version of Origenist universalism. In Orthodox Christianity, however, universalism was never affirmed as an official or public teaching of the church. One might call it instead a tolerated private opinion. I found that Orthodox attitudes toward Origen through the centuries were double-sided and ambivalent (as my own attitude is), acknowledging Origen’s undoubted contributions to Christian theology and spirituality but finding fault with his speculative excesses. Western esotericists, who were outside of traditional churches or hovering about its fringes, maintained a robust universalism from around 1700 up to the mid-1900s.

Yet until that point, few official church teachers in Protestant Germany, Britain, or North America publicly affirmed universal salvation—even though privately some may have been universalists. Something changed in the 1950s, and I believe it was Barth’s affirmation of universal election that allowed universalism to come out of the shadows. From the 1950s through the 1970s, universalism was most closely associated with modernist Protestantism. Prior to Vatican II, one finds some private musings on the possibility of salvation for all among certain Catholic intellectuals, even though no official Catholic spokespersons affirm universalism.

The next step in the process occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, as Catholics discussed “the unchurched” and evangelicals debated “the unevangelized.” A book from the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope?, initiated a turn toward “hopeful universalism” among Catholics, leading into more overt affirmations of universalism later on. Similarly, the tentative suggestions by the British evangelical John Stott regarding conditionalism or annihilationism triggered intra-evangelical debates over the final scope of salvation.

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3. Don’t be afraid of teaching doctrine that you or your students don’t fully understand.

Just as we sometimes neglect to teach children how and why to worship, our pedagogical focus is often limited to teaching them morals and sentimentality without sufficient engagement with doctrine or dogma. Dorothy Sayers presciently critiqued the rejection of doctrine in her 1947 essay “Creed or Chaos,” and her argument is even more relevant 70 years later. “‘No creed but Christ’ has been a popular slogan for so long that we are apt to accept it, without inquiring whether religion without theology has any meaning,” she wrote. “And however unpopular I may make myself, I shall and will affirm that the reason why the Churches are discredited today is not that they are too bigoted about theology, but that they have run away from theology.”

When I first began to teach Sunday school at our small church, I found that I succeeded most when I aimed over the children’s apparent intellectual level, not under. For example, one of the most successful lessons we ever had was provided by a Bible scholar from our congregation who came in to teach the kids about Bible translation. The children loved exploring something new and were excited to learn how to write Hebrew words. For the same reason, the classes I taught on theological doctrines tended to go much better than I imagined. The students had something new to think about, and learning more about Christian doctrine helped them to connect with lessons and stories they had been taught in other classes and contexts.

We may be tempted to think that digitization makes memorization redundant. The truth is, rather, that digitization yields distraction. I can select whatever I want from online storage at any time. The possibilities are endless, and so the order, steadiness, and peacefulness to which Hugh alludes consistently escape us.

The distraction of our information age fails at character formation. What’s in cyberspace cannot shape our characters, only what is in the mind. (To be sure, data and images often move from cyberspace to our mind, at which point they do shape our character for good or ill.) Having information at our fingertips is not the same as having stored it in our mind. This is why both classical and medieval authors were deeply concerned with memorization. Traditional practices such as lectio divina are grounded in the recognition that distraction must be countered by memorization and meditation. (The two were virtually synonymous in the Middle Ages.) Medieval monks devised all sorts of ways to facilitate Scripture memorization because they recognized that it offers the boundaries and confines within which the moral life can flourish.

Memorization is a Lenten practice, reshaping our memories to be like God’s. When our memories are reshaped and reordered according to the immutable faithfulness of God in Christ, we re-appropriate God’s character—his steadfast love, his mercy, his compassion. Repentance, therefore, is a turning back to the virtues of God as we see them in Christ. Being united to him, we are united to the very character of God, for it is in the God-man that God’s virtue and human virtue meet. The hypostatic union is the locus of our repentance: In Christ human memory is re-figured to the memory of God.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since I read it:

Having information at our fingertips is not the same as having stored it in our mind.

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flickerOver the strained time-ridden facesDistracted from distraction by distractionFilled with fancies and empty of meaningTumid apathy with no concentrationMen and bits of paper, whirled by the cold windThat blows before and after time,Wind in and out of unwholesome lungsTime before time and after.

Sacasas concludes his brief commentary:

The assumption seems to be, “No worries, we’ve always been mediocre and always will be.” This may be true, but it is a symptom of some kind of cultural anemia that we now embrace this line of thinking in defense of our gadgets and our toys. The question is not whether we have in the past made any better use of our time, the question is whether our tools and our social climate in general are more or less conducive to the pursuit of some kind of excellence, however halting the pursuit. Johnson noted a certain guilt that Eliot experienced when he perceived himself to have failed to use his time well. It is perhaps the general absence of such guilt in the Wireless Age that is most telling of our present ills.

Taylor notes again the “blowing off steam” hypothesis. If you don’t find a way to relieve the pressure within the relative safety of semi-sanctioned ritual, then you will get more serious, uncontrolled, and violent eruptions. But Taylor also notes an alternative or possibly complementary hypothesis present in Turner’s work: “that the code relentlessly applied would drain us of all energy; that the code needs to recapture some of the untamed force of the contrary principle.”

Coming back, then, to my intuited analogy, it goes something like this: carnival is to the ordinary demands of piety in medieval society as, in contemporary society, the back stage is to the front stage relative to identity work.

It’s not a perfect analogy. Indeed, I confess that I may be stretching a bit to make it work. It really only focuses on one aspect of the backstage experience as Goffman theorized it: the backstage as a space to let one’s guard down, to relieve the pressures of a constantly calibrated performance before an ill-defined virtual audience, to blow off some steam.

Nonetheless, I think there’s something useful in the approach. The main idea that emerged for me was this: in our contemporary, digitally augmented society the mounting pressure we experience is not the pressure of conforming to the rigid demands of piety and moral probity, rather it is the pressure of unremitting impression management, identity work, and self-consciousness. Moreover, there is no carnival. Or, better, what presents itself as a carnival experience is, in reality, just another version of the disciplinary experience.

Consider the following.

First, the early internet, Web 1.0, was a rather different place. In fact, a case could be made for the early internet being itself the carnivalesque experience, the backstage where, under the cloak of anonymity, you got to play a variety of roles, try on different identities, and otherwise step out of the front stage persona (“on the internet nobody knows you are a dog,” Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, etc.). As our internet experience, especially post-Facebook, became more explicitly tied to our “IRL” identity, then the dynamic flipped. Now we could no longer experience “life on screen” as anti-structure, as backstage, as a place of release. Online identity and offline identity became too hopelessly entangled. Confusion about this entanglement during the period of transition accounts for all manner of embarrassing and damaging gaffs and missteps. The end result is that the mainstream experience of the internet became an expansive, always on front stage. A corollary of this development is the impulse to carve out some new online backstage experience, as with fake Instagram accounts or through the use of ephemeral-by-design communication of the sort that Snapchat pioneered.

Indeed, this may be a way of framing the history of the internet: as a progression, or regression, from the promise of a liberating experience of anti-structure to the imposition of a unprecedentedly expansive and invasive instrument of structure. Many of our debates about the internet seem to be usefully illuminated by the resulting tension. Perhaps we might put it this way, the internet becomes an instrument of structure on a massive scale precisely by operating in the guise of an anti-structure. We are lured, as it were, by the promise of liberation and empowerment only to discover that we have been ensnared in a programmable web of discipline and control.

Coming to you from Alabama, yes, but not Birmingham. It’s Auburn for us tonight, with an early morning obligation/opportunity tomorrow and then on to somewhere else for the afternoon and perhaps the next day as well. No more details until we see how it all works out – I’m sadly superstitious in that way – but if you want some sense of what’s happening, check out Instagram, particularly Instagram Stories. I tend to post things there.

The big news of late has been the tragic Ireland abortion referendum – which, in the end, is a referendum on the state of Catholicism as well. As disturbing as the referendum itself was, just as disturbing to me was the reaction of the supporters. Cheering and celebrating? Not unexpected, but certainly disgusting. There is a lot of insightful reading out there about the referendum, but two I’ll point out here are:

Ireland has become a different place, not a more tolerant, open and respectful place, but a place with a heart closed to the ones who will die because they are not deemed human enough to be protected.

And a heart closed to the thousands of women who wish they lived in a society that cared enough to tackle the profound injustices such as poverty that force women to choose abortion, rather than proposing the ending of a life instead.

I knew we were in trouble months ago when a prominent journalist said she absolutely accepted the unborn was a baby, but that she felt a woman’s right to choose trumped that fact.

I waited for the outcry. Someone had just said that a baby must die to facilitate an adult’s choice. There was none. I felt an indescribable chill.

The next generation is our hope, not some kind of choice.

Any movement that urges breaking the bond of intergenerational solidarity for ideological reasons, all while abandoning women to the coldness of individual choice, undermines all that is central to our humanity.

Nor did two-thirds of voters seem to understand the concept of equality, instead making ableist arguments. “How could a foetus be the equal of a fully grown woman?” ran the banal, unimaginative and clichéd argument.

They are not equal in cognitive ability, in power or in strength. Neither is a newborn baby or a three-year-old. The helplessness and defencelessness of new humans are designed to instil in us a passion to protect them from harm because they are equal to adults only in their common possession of humanity and their right to life.

In the wake of the Irish referendum abolishing their constitutional protection of unborn children, some of have attempted to roll out the old: “Oh, don’t worry. Banning abortion doesn’t reduce abortions, it just makes people go elsewhere to get them.”

All of these are false. Making something illegal of course makes that thing less common. Honestly, if we believed that making something illegal had no effect on whether or not people did it, why would we make anything illegal? Why would we ban things like homicide and burglary if we thought that illegality had no effect on whether people do something.

I have such a long list of articles and links about matters digital and technological. Such a long list. Some related to the impact of all of this on our brains, many taking on assumptions about tech and education, and a growing number about Big Tech and information control. I keep going back to mid-century dystopian fiction, from Farenheit 451 to 1984 and then I ponder McCluhan, and I try to sort it out.

One of the minor points I ponder is the relationship of information tech to churches and evangelization. I have never been one to suggest that a Really True Evangelizing Disciple-Making Parish/Diocese must be All In with the Tech – is your parish on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/MySpace ?

The far more important question, to me is – have you reached out to every single parish in your parish boundaries? Does everyone know about everything you offer? Is your parish aware of every homebound person living in its boundaries, is every household aware that the corporal and spiritual works of mercy and worship of God are happening in your parish?

Sure, I guess you can let them know about it through Facebook, right? But why not, you know, go knock on their doors instead? Be an actual living – IRL – presence in the life of the neighborhood?

Yeah, do both. Great! For sure have a decent parish webpage with MASS TIMES FRONT AND CENTER WITHOUT HAVING TO DOWNLOAD A PDF TO FIND THEM FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE. But person-to-person comes first.

I fully realize that a major reason the Bee (and my webcomic, for that matter) was able to blow up like it did was because of social media — Facebook in particular. This is just how it goes when you make things for the internet: you create, you post to social media, you hope people like it and it spreads. But the power that Facebook held over me as a content creator began to make me very uneasy.

True crime fascinates me, and this is a comparison that often comes to mind: to become a successful content creator you have to use Facebook, and using Facebook, especially if you’re a Christian and/or a conservative, is sort of like going to a mafia loan shark for $10,000. They’re happy to give it to you, just like Facebook will gladly give you the opportunity for your content to go viral on their massive platform. But then, if it does, they own you. You have to conform to their rules and their worldview, and jump through every hoop they put in front of you, if you want to remain a successful content creator. It’s just like a loan from a local mob guy: sure, now you’ve got $10,000 in your hand, but you’re going to pay a high price in return. You’re going to have to alter whatever needs to be altered — even your worldview — to accommodate Facebook. If you miss a payment or step out of line, you’re going to get a beating. And if they ever decide you’re too much trouble, they’ll just shoot you. Facebook has the power to kill publishers, and they do, not only based on publishing techniques, but based on worldview. Just think about that.

This takes us into the bigger and scarier picture, which is that Facebook and Google have a practical duopoly on information. The web is where everyone gets information about everything, and they literally control what information the world sees. I could write a million words on this topic, but I won’t. I cover it regularly on CDR, and the CDR Manifesto speaks on it. Suffice it to say, my worldview combined with my job description gives me a unique vantage point from which to view the current state of things. As a follower of Christ, I am primarily concerned with glorifying God, loving my neighbor, and spreading the gospel. I’ve thought about this deeply and carefully, and I think the centralization of the internet is one of the greatest threats to the spread of the gospel, and the well-being of mankind, that we face today. Maybe the single biggest threat. It is tyranny over information. It’s a handful of people who are hostile to the Christian message and the plight of the individual deciding what’s good and bad, true and false. It’s never been seen before on this scale. I am no conspiracy theorist; never have been. From where I sit, this danger is as clear as day.

All of this is to say nothing about the long-term ramifications of the massive collection of personal data, or the incalculable intrapersonal effects social media is having on us.

If you only come here on Fridays, please check out my post from earlier in the week on the letters of St. Marie de l’Incarnation to her son, whom she left with relatives at the age of eleven, so she could join the Ursulines. The Cruelest of all Mothers.

Something similar has happened this year. It’s a different house, but robins have managed to find a space to build a nest – squeezed in between a rain spout and roof eaves. Fortunately (for us) it’s on a side of the house close enough to the ground that I can set up a step ladder and we can peak. My older son is tall enough to be able to see without assistance, but I can only spy with my phone camera – I can just hold it up there while the parents are away hunting worms, and take a quick snap. I think the photo on the left must have been just a day or so after they hatched and the second just three days later. We’ll see if they’re even still around when we get back.

Now, parts of it are just wrong and really off about the Mass – whoever wrote it hadn’t been to Mass in a while and/or had really hazy memories of what happens, when and how. And it definitely reflects a most superficial version of modern Irish cultural Catholicism.

But just know that my daughter said, “Mom, you have to watch this. You’ll think the music part is hilarious.”

It is – in a really painful way. Painful because it’s true, not just in regard to the past it represents (WAAAAAY back in the 1980’s), but also in terms of the now. In short: Think you’re all cool and down with the kids now.? Fine. Just wait…..

I’ve watched the first two episodes now (this – Godfellas – is #5) – and I give the series an “Eh” – it’s amusing at times, fun for the late 80’s references, definitely not kid-friendly, although I do like the conceit – O’Dowd plays the imaginary friend of this very well-played and charming boy growing up in western Ireland in the late 80’s. It shows flashes of authenticity here and there, but there’s also a sort of shallow meanness and neutrality towards weirdness that I find off-putting.

And maybe the portrayal of the er, pastoral musician here is part of that, but maybe because I resonate with the critique I can look past the shallow meanness in this case.. Guilty as charged.

But oh…

“When we sing for the Baby Jesus it’s never awful..…Usually”

(If you watch, note the dissonance, in the first Mass scene, between the music book in the stand and what’s actually being sung. Snort. How can that not be intentional?)